Manuel Alvarez Bravo
In the darkroom of Manuel Alvarez Bravo in Mexico City, right next to his enlarger was a small piece of cardboard with the hand-written statement, "Hay tiempo." There is time. And so there was for a man who lived to be 100. Alvarez Bravo never disputed any interpretation of his work. Curators have labeled him a surrealist, called his work Freudian, Marxist, patriotic and symbolist. He has never disagreed. When I inquired, he said, "They might be right."
He once said, "I just get the will to do it. I don't plan a photograph in advance…I work by impulse. No philosophy. No ideas. Not by the head but by the eyes. Eventually inspiration comes, instinct is the same as inspiration, and eventually it comes."
In 1967, I took $100 and spent a month hitchhiking and photographing in Mexico. In Oaxaca, I found a poster advertising an exhibition of the photographs of Manuel Alvarez Bravo at the Escuela de Bellas Artes. The image on the poster was a portrait of a young woman whose face was striped by the shadows of a palm frond. I stole the poster from the wall, and I probably still have it. I found the exhibition and was thoroughly and permanently changed by it. I tried with every exposure that month to replicate his imagery. Don Manuel also said, "A photographer's main instrument is his eyes. Strange as it may seem, many photographers choose to use the eyes of another photographer, past or present, instead of their own. Those photographers are blind." The poetic evocations, the rich and mysterious references to pre-Columbian symbols and recognition of the transformative power of Mexico's intense light, all were beyond my understanding of the medium. I was 21, and Alvarez Bravo was a giant.
Twenty-four years later, as a curator and the director of the Museum of Photographic Arts I asked Don Manuel if I could work with him to create a career retrospective to tour the United States. After several days of conversations, to my great good fortune, he agreed. This bilingual show, "Revelaciones: The Art of Manuel Alvarez Bravo," opened in San Diego in 1990 and traveled to ten American cities. Hundreds of thousands of people saw it.
I asked his good friend Nissan Perez, curator of photography at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, to write an essay for the catalog of our exhibition. Nissan speaks six languages (including Ladino, an ancient form of Spanish) and writes fluently in five, and had worked with Manuel years earlier. His essay is the only one in English to interpret the pre-Columbian mythological references in much of Alvarez Bravo's work. When I inquired if Nissan's essay had been correct about his thinking, Don Manuel said, "Maybe."
Alvarez Bravo was born in Mexico City in 1902. In his early memories there was a revolution going on outside his door. He arrived at his affection for the hardworking underclass and pride in the ancient heritage of Mexico before he understood that he was absorbing it. He worked as a government bureaucrat until the age of 27, when he was able to work full-time in photography.
In the 1920s, when the revolution had ended Mexico experienced an artistic renaissance that drew the attention of the entire world. He developed friendships with the great artists of the time. The muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Frida Kahlo (whose father Guillermo was one of his photography teachers), Maria Izquierdo, Dr. Atl, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Sergei Eisenstein, Andre Breton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Rufino Tamayo, Octavio Paz, all became his friends.
Many of the major figures of his era in Mexico were flamboyant, loud, feisty and bombastic. Rivera was a huge man who carried a pistol and dominated every room he entered. Siqueiros' many deportations, exiles and jailings, Modotti's deportation for her political activities and her alleged involvement in the assassination of her lover, stories about Frida Kahlo and Nahui Olin abound. The murals being made at the time were huge, often the size of buildings. The colors were brilliant in the dry sun. Their subjects included struggling Maya gods, peasant revolutionaries wresting their living from a reluctant earth, huge backs bent to the task, evil businessmen fighting to enchain them all.
In this milieu, a small, shy man, understated nearly to the point of silence, made little black-and-white photographs of quotidian observations in the streets of Mexico City: a dog asleep at a gate, a ladder against a wall, fresh sheets hanging on a line, a woman brushing her long hair. It is amazing that he was even noticed at all. Yet through revelations of timeless yet unremarkable moments, his work has become as important and lasting as that of his noisier and more dramatic colleagues.
I made this portrait on my curatorial visit in 1989. The infant on his lap is his grandson Manuelito. Don Manuel was 87 and this was his grandchild…not his great-grandchild as one might expect at his age. I teach the history of photography at San Diego State University and each year I show this photograph along with his work. In 2014 I projected the image and one young woman in the class nearly leapt out of her seat and shrieked, "Oh my God, I'm dating him!" Her boyfriend was the 25 year old Manuelito.
The exhibition was wonderful. Revelaciones: The Art of Manuel Alvarez Bravo opened in 1990 in San Diego and traveled to nine other museums in the US. It was the first US exhibition of his work that was entirely bilingual in wall text and in the educational packages that traveled with the show. These were curriculum guides for teachers at various levels and ages to incorporate the museum show with the needs of the teachers in each city.
There is an odd and very common issue that when artists of great repute are asked to bring out their archives so that a curator can pour over them in search of material that best identifies their career trajectory, they tend to bring out mostly the material that has been much exhibited and published. They presumably have sifted and winnowed their decades of images and found these to be the most important. Then, sometimes, after they have died, a curator will examine the entire archive and find glorious examples that were not previously exhibited or published. Much Alvarez Bravo work has been published posthumously that equals or surpasses some of our curatorial choices, but we had never seen those pictures. The question then needs to be asked, and not just as a pro forma interrogation, is it appropriate to shape the artist's body of work in ways that they had not intended? There is no one correct answer to this.
Famously, John Szarkowski, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art had thousands of rolls of film shot by Garry Winogrand, developed and proofed after the artist's death. From these he selected several dozen to be printed and exhibited. There was a great deal of debate over the propriety of this. It raised the question, is John Szarkowski now Garry Winogrand? Even though Szarkowski was the most supportive curatorial voice Winogrand could ask for, and often gave advice freely to Garry, the decision of which images to print from any contact sheet was Garry's alone. John may have selected those images that most resemble Garry's vision, as he saw it, but is his vision congruent with Garry's? Would Garry have not selected them because he might have felt that those ideas were already covered by better previous images? We can never be certain.
Photography dealers often, naturally feel that the never-before-seen work should be exhibited. There is profit in that. It is also a general truism that the artist, especially toward the end of an illustrious career, rarely gets helpful criticism from close comrades and family. We all know the famous nuggets and want to see them. As a curator and museum director I can say that much of the public wants to see what they already know from an artist. An Ansel Adams show without Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, or Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite Valley will certainly bring bitter commentary from audiences who want and expect to see their favorites.
It is my contention that if work is shown under such circumstances, that it ought to be labeled accordingly. In some cases the photographer may have exhibited the work in the 1930s and 40s but no catalog documented that show. The vintage prints may have been signed at the time. The image may then have slipped the mind of the artist or simply lost its allure to him.
Manuel and Colette arrived for the opening. Two things happened at the airport while we waited to greet them. First, we had Isaac Artenstein, a Mexican American filmmaker there with cameras rolling. Many people were waiting to welcome their friends and relatives from Mexico City. These were just a typical and random selection of people, many of Mexican background, yet when someone asked Artenstein if there was a celebrity on the flight, they were delighted and excited to hear that Manuel Alvarez Bravo was arriving. They seemed to know a lot about Don Manuel.
The second thing I recall is that they were delayed. Everyone from the flight passed by. but not the Alvarez Bravos. When they finally did emerge from customs a half hour later, they said a customs officer asked them many questions. It seems that Manuel's name showed up on a list of people who were associated with Communists. In the 1930s and 40s many of the artists in Mexico were Communists or sympathetic to their politics. Diego and Frida, and the other muralists were all part of the movement. It was astonishing and embarrassing that he would be asked these questions 40 years later. Manuel had been in the US many times and he had never been asked about these connections before. Welcome to the US indeed!
In November of 1997 several Mexican curators hosted the annual Oracle meeting, the gathering of curators of photography from around the world. While there, Nissan Perez of the Israel Museum, Eikoh Hosoe from Japan, Yuko Yamaji of the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in Kiyosato, Japan, Roberto Hinestrosa from Tijuana and I visited Don Manuel. He was 95 years old then and had recently been very ill. He was at home with round-the-clock nursing and in a hospital bed. He was very weak and we were allowed only a half hour with him. Clearly our visit cheered him but it depressed us. The great Manuel Alvarez Bravo was dying. We all knew it would likely be the last time we saw him. But by the next year he had recovered and was shooting again and working on one of his two final books!
In his last years, his eyesight deteriorated, yet he never stopped working. He photographed the large trees in the courtyard of his home in Coyoacan and the shadows they cast on his walls. He could see those grand shapes and elegantly composed them in a sort of balletic combat between the forces of light and darkness.
All photographs are about time, its progress and its arrest. Don Manuel's observations will continue to intrigue and charm us. His death does nothing to diminish that. These preserved revelations will slow us down and remind us to pause and look at the texture of our lives and the time that encases it. Hay tiempo. There is time.